At the Southern Border, a Do-It-Yourself Tack on Security

Members of the Arizona Border Recon, on the move in Arizona in November. The group is a paramilitary organization performing reconnaissance operations along the border with Mexico.CreditJohnny Milano

His radio crackled. “Can you hear it?” a veteran Army soldier named Tim Foley asked one weekend afternoon while traversing the remote trails off the remote community of Sasabe, a dot along a busy drug-smuggling corridor in southern Arizona.

Arizona Border Recon has patrolled the state's southern border since 2011. Follow the controversial group on one of its operations.Published OnDec. 21, 2016CreditImage by Johnny Milano. Technology by Samsung.

When the housing market collapsed and Mr. Foley, 57, lost his construction job and then his home, he moved to Sasabe, on the United States-Mexico border, to start his own citizens’ border patrol. Mr. Foley prefers to call his group, Arizona Border Recon, a nongovernmental organization, but others label it a militia and scoff at the notion of private individuals, many of them armed, patrolling the border.

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The border fence in Nogales, Ariz., patrolled and monitored by United States Customs and Border Protection.CreditJohnny Milano

That Sunday, Mr. Foley was out trying to decipher the traffickers’ scrambled communications his portable radio had intercepted. He held a .40-caliber pistol in hand and his dog, a Pitbull named Rocko, by its leash. Those were his two weapons.

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A Border Patrol agent patting down a migrant who wandered into the Arizona Border Recon camp in November.CreditJohnny Milano

Mr. Foley argues that there is a war going on at the southern border, even though the number of apprehensions has declined precipitously — to about 409,000 in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 from 1.2 million in the 2005 fiscal year. He served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before he went to work in construction, where he came away believing that the rules of employment and immigration were broken.

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Jeremy Wood, a veteran and Arizona Border Recon member, resting in March after spending most of the previous 24 hours on watch for scouts, migrants and cartel groups.CreditJohnny Milano

“The illegals,” he said, “had fake IDs, fake Social Security cards.” One week, they would be gone after being flagged in the federal electronic system that employers use to check employees’ legal status. “The next week, the same guys would show up with another fake ID, another fake Social Security card.”

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Chris Maloof, a member of the Arizona Border Recon, hiked along mountain trails in August, intent on cutting off paths used by migrants and drug couriers.CreditJohnny Milano

The Border Patrol operates according to a “shift mentality,” their responsibilities limited by time and distance, he said. Many agents are assigned to the station in Tucson, more than an hour away. “When they’re coming down,” Mr. Foley said, “they’re being reactive” to an image on a video camera or a ground sensor set off by someone where no one should be.

“They’re already behind,” he said. “What we do is try to be proactive.”

He lives in Sasabe; many of the members of Arizona Border Recon live there or nearby. “Because we live out here, we do this 24/7,” he said.

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Members of the Arizona Border Recon monitoring radio traffic at their base camp in November.CreditJohnny Milano

Mr. Foley runs background checks on volunteers and verifies their military records, but there is no government or public oversight over who joins this group or any of the militia organizations operating on America’s southern border.

Most of the group’s members are either veterans or retired law enforcement officers. They are volunteers who have been trained to read the signs that migrants leave in the wild — a snapped twig, for instance, or the characteristic print of a piece of carpet glued to the bottom of a migrant’s shoe to complicate tracking efforts.

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The Arizona Border Recon traveling from its observation post in November.CreditJohnny Milano

Border Patrol agents “actually like us,” Mr. Foley said. “We have so much intel of what’s happening and where it’s happening.”

The group’s mission, as explained on its website, “is not to overthrow any government, or take the law into our own hands.” It is to serve as another set of eyes and ears where eyes and ears are so few.

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Blaine Cooper, a figure in the militia standoff in Oregon early in 2016, seen here lacing up his boots at the Arizona Border Recon’s forward operating base in October 2014.CreditJohnny Milano

Mr. Foley said he and the other volunteers had given water, food and blankets to thirsty, hungry and cold migrants whom they have found lost and disoriented in the desert, abandoned by the smugglers who brought them across. Then they turn the migrants over to the Border Patrol.

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Members of the Arizona Border Recon scanning the terrain for migrant activity in November.CreditJohnny Milano

“We stay on the mountains seven to 10 days,” Mr. Foley said. “We sleep where we can, when we can, and we stay focused.”

Mr. Foley is known to others in his group as “Nailer,” a nod to his former life as a carpenter.

“Because people think we’re militia, they think we’re running around pointing weapons at people, shooting at people,” he said. “Six years and we’ve never fired a shot.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: A Do-It-Yourself Tack on Border Patrol. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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